ThAT Thursdays: Fellowship Seminars
✦ ThAT Thursdays: Fellowship Seminar Series
We are pleased to share the second session of the Thinking About Thinking Fellowship Seminar Series, a new programme bringing together researchers and entrepreneurs working at the forefront of intelligence across AI, neuroscience and cognitive science.
Seminar title: Raising the floor with frontier technology: building applied AI for governments, the third sector, and other consequential systems at scale
Speaker: Anna Schrimpf and Nicolay Hagen
Time: 6pm BST
Interviewed by: Anastasia Ilina Academic Lead
Supported by: XTX Markets | Cooley
As frontier AI systems move from research labs into governments, public institutions, healthcare systems, philanthropic organisations and other high-stakes settings, the central question is no longer only what these systems can do. It is where they should be deployed, under what constraints, and in whose interests.
Recent debates around the use of advanced AI in military and governmental contexts have made this question increasingly sharp. They point to a broader problem at the heart of applied AI: how do we translate powerful technical systems into institutions where legitimacy, accountability, operational reality and public value all matter?
For our second session, we are joined by Anna Schrimpf and Nicolay Hagen, co-founders of Varden, an applied AI company working with organisations that run consequential systems at scale. Their collaboration began at Thinking About Thinking’s AE Global Summit in London, where they first met before going on to build Varden together.
Anna and Nicolay will share what they have learned building AI products with governments, foundations, non-profits and corporate enterprises across access to justice, healthcare, school nutrition, sustainability and philanthropic capital. Drawing on Anna’s decade scaling evidence-based programmes at J-PAL and Nicolay’s path to co-founding Varden, they will speak candidly about why some global problems attract attention and resources while others do not, what works and what fails when deploying AI inside public institutions, and what young technologists and researchers should know if they want to do useful work in the world without becoming naïve about power, incentives or implementation.
This will be a conversation about applied AI as an institutional craft: not only how to build systems that work, but how to decide what is worth building in the first place.
Fun fact: They met at our AE Global Summit in London last year!
About the series
ThAT Fellowship Seminars are designed to give our Academic Fellowship community direct access to leading thinkers working across intelligence research and innovation.
For a limited time, the first sessions will be open to the wider Thinking About Thinking network as an introduction to the Fellowship.
Share this seminar on social media using #ThinkingAboutThinking and #ThATThursdays to receive a free ticket to the AE Global Summit.